X-sociative speech act Enryo”

The aim of this paper is to identify a Japanese speech act " enryo " in Japanese communication. " Enryo " is a typical Japanese speech act performed in the context of communication where "to assess and acknowledge one's place in relation to the other person" is highly respected as one of the social norms. " Enryo " is a social as well as regulatory act performed to maintain the expected social and emotional equilibrium between interlocutors. It is generally acknowledged that " enryo " is performed for the sake of the encoder, thus may be regarded as a dissociative and unidirectional regulative act from the encoder to the decoder, because the encoder is believed to observe Leech (1980)'s Politeness Maxim whenever s/he performs the speech act.